SUPPORTFix: PhotoBucket broken image links

As you may or may not have noticed, PhotoBucket has changed their terms of service and now charging for the privilege of hosting images, including any past images already posted. So, if you are using PB to host your images that you post or use in your signature, this is what we're greeted with when viewing:

If in your signature, please either delete it or upload to the site. If possible, if you have some pictures in posts, especially articles and write-ups, please update them. It is recommended that you upload all images directly to the GMTNation using the "Upload a file" feature.

Did you get an issue resolved, your GMT back on the road, or save by using this site? Consider purchasing a supporting membership - if you saved a trip to a dealership / garage, you're already money ahead! ALL proceeds go ONLY to maintaining the website.
Tech2 owner, covering N. IL / S. WI areas.

Gotta love people who help circumvent a site's wholesale financial rape of their user community (e.g.; not *all* hacking is 'bad')

Did you get an issue resolved, your GMT back on the road, or save by using this site? Consider purchasing a supporting membership - if you saved a trip to a dealership / garage, you're already money ahead! ALL proceeds go ONLY to maintaining the website.
Tech2 owner, covering N. IL / S. WI areas.

Somehow, I think that if Photof#ckit does block it again, it won't be long before it's circumvented again. There were 3 different versions of the 'unblock' add-in for Chrome that I found (and maybe more), so I don't think it was too difficult for people to get around it.

Unless PB actually invents something that goes site by site and removes the content, forcing the original posters to upload again (and, thus, forces the user to pay the ransom, if they use PB) - or, track down all of the 'old' users and threaten legal action, yada yada... it won't be too hard to keep 'unhiding' the photos. Option #2 would be orders of magnitude easier than option #1.

On a related (?) topic... one of my favorite Chrome add-ins is 'Removes Taboola' (I hate that organization with a passion, given that they'll slow down Chrome to a crawl continually loading content a la Fakebook / Twitler)

Did you get an issue resolved, your GMT back on the road, or save by using this site? Consider purchasing a supporting membership - if you saved a trip to a dealership / garage, you're already money ahead! ALL proceeds go ONLY to maintaining the website.
Tech2 owner, covering N. IL / S. WI areas.

Administrator

As it has been setup now and for the past several months, all attachments that are linked to external sources will be imported to our site and any referencing link will be replaced to represent the local file location. However, I'm not sure if that works with PhotoBucket links. I'm also not certain how it handles external links that existed before we implemented this method.

We prefer that all content is hosted locally on our server to prevent issues like this, and we may move to prevent hot-linking when we upgrade our forum software in the near future.